Death Watch

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I thought you loved Atherton.’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot.’

  ‘What brought this Potts to mind, anyway?’

  ‘Well, we had to go to one of these receptions one evening at the Festival Hall – the Waterloo Room, or some such nirvana. The usual speed is for the orchestra to hang around the bar looking sheepish, eating all the free canapés and totally ignoring the punters, which is not the purpose at all. So on this occasion the orchestra manager came and rousted us all out and made us go off and do the pretty. He grabbed hold of Gary and pointed him in the direction of this fabulous-looking old dame with a blue rinse and a fur coat and said, “She looks as if she’s rolling in it. Go and be nice to her.”

  ‘So old Gary goes up to her, and, typical style, gives her a huge grin and says, “Allo darlin’, oo are you?” The old girl looks a bit surprised, but she dimples gamely and says “Oh, I’m not anyone important, really, but my husband’s in oil.” And Gary stares at her with his mouth well open and says, “What is ‘e then, a fuckin’ sardine?” ’ Joanna sighed happily at the memory. ‘God, I miss him! Dem were de days, Joxer, dem were de days.’

  ‘A pathologist?’

  ‘Yes Guv, at University College Hospital in 1974,’ said Norma. ‘She and her husband had been living in Hampstead Garden Suburb—’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yes, and handy for both their jobs. But about six months after he died, she moved to a similar post in Hammersmith Hospital, and she and the child moved to a house in Brook Green.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Slider said. ‘Neal had been living in Golders Green—’

  ‘About half a mile from Hampstead Garden Suburb—’

  ‘And when the Shaftesbury Avenue station closed, he moved to Hammersmith, got a job at Betcon and a flat in Dalling Road—’

  ‘About half a mile from Brook Green,’ Norma concluded. ‘Coincidence?’

  ‘I hope we shall find out,’ said Slider.

  ‘But a pathologist, Guv – could be very helpful if you wanted to kill a whole string of people.’ She started to tick off the points on her fingers. ‘In the first place, you’d be cold-blooded enough about bodies. In the second place, you’d know enough about post mortem effects to rig your murders to look like accidents or suicides—’

  ‘You’d also know that the ligature mark of electrical flex on Webb’s neck would prove that he’d been murdered,’ Slider pointed out.

  ‘But the murderer obviously expected the body to be burned in the fire,’ Norma said.

  ‘Even so, she couldn’t have been sure the ligature mark would be sufficiently burned as to be unrecognisable. And changing the flex for rope was an unnecessary act, if the idea was to fake suicide. Webb could just as easily have strangled himself with flex as hanged himself with rope, and a pathologist would know that.’

  ‘Maybe she got careless. But you must admit she’s got a very good motive,’ Norma hurried on. ‘Classic revenge. Her mind turned by the terrible tragedy, she blames the whole watch for his death, and sets about murdering them one by one—’

  ‘Very MGM. I can see Bette Davis in the part,’ Slider agreed. ‘All the same, if you’re thinking she moved to Hammersmith to keep tabs on Neal, the more easily to rub him out, tell me why didn’t she get to him for another sixteen years?’

  ‘Saving the best till last, perhaps. If she considered him the most guilty—’

  ‘But he wasn’t the last. There was Barry Lister — and two left alive.’

  ‘But the two left alive weren’t on duty on the night of the fire,’ Norma said triumphantly, ‘and poor old Mouth-wash’d had a heart condition for years. She may well have thought she wouldn’t need to do him at all, that nature would do it for her. As was the case in the end. We don’t know that he wouldn’t have been next on the list, if he hadn’t popped his clogs of his own accord.’

  ‘She may have moved to Hammersmith simply to be near Neal, her former best buddy and putative lover,’ Slider pointed out. ‘Nothing more suspicious than that.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Norma said, giving him a sample of her West Coast smile, which had been known to disarm the most thick-skinned villain and reduce him to stammering self-consciousness. ‘But on the other hand—’

  ‘Yes,’ Slider said. ‘The hysterical outburst at the fire station helps the thing along. All the same, why wait eleven years to begin the murders? That rather takes the edge off the idea of the white-hot fury of revenge.’

  ‘But revenge is a dish best eaten cold.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Ah,’ Slider said. ‘Well, I’d better go and see Mrs Forrester, find out what sort of a cook she is.’

  The house Marsha Forrester lived in, three floors and a semi-basement, had been built for one moderately wealthy family, and now, through the turning of the wheel, was divided into four flats for only slightly less wealthy people. Mrs Forrester had the drawing-room floor: high ceilings, mouldings, and a handsome fireplace. She had a collection of early English landscape watercolours that Slider would almost have contemplated crime for, and a seven-foot grand piano which seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of displaying the Chinese bowl full of pot-pourri which admired its own reflection in the polished surface of the lid.

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have tried to have a day off,’ she said, returning from answering the telephone, which had rung just as she was showing Slider in. ‘So much for my dolce far niente’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Slider.

  ‘Never mind, you can’t help it. A glass of sherry?’

  Sherry was a drink he’d never seen the point of. The sweet, he’d found, tasted like cough syrup, and the dry like old tin cans; but on the other hand, the bottle she was hovering over didn’t have either of the words Harveys or British on it, so he thought he might be in for a new experience.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  She brought the glass over to him, and then sat down on the chesterfield with her own, tucking one leg up under her. She was half a dozen years or so older than him, Slider thought, but looked very, very good for it. She was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt, and her short grey-sandy hair, cut in what used to be called a page-boy bob, was shoved back out of the way behind a cloth-covered Alice band. Clothes and style would not have looked out of place on an eighteen-year-old, but Marsha Forrester could carry it off. She must, he assumed, be wearing makeup, but it was applied so as to look as though she was not wearing any, and about her there hung a faint and evocative fragrance which he tracked down through memory at last as Balmain’s Vent Vert. If she went to all this trouble on her day off, he thought, what would she have looked like en fête?

  He sipped the sherry cautiously. It was almost colourless, and tasted of grapes, with a slight hint of burnt sugar. He looked up and found her watching his surprise, and smiled, and said ‘Delicious.’

  She smiled too. ‘Good. So, then, what’s all this about? I suppose it’s to do with poor Dick Neal, is it?’

  ‘Why should you think that?’

  ‘So cautious, Inspector? Well, I can’t think of any other reason you’d be coming to visit me. Was there something untoward about his death? Am I suspected of something?’ Despite her light and teasing tone, there was a watchful look about her, Slider thought. Before he could answer she went on, ‘You’d better tell me straight away, when is the alibi required for?’

  ‘If you know about his death, you ought to know that,’ he said, equally lightly.

  ‘Yes, but I’ve a terrible memory. I know it was some time at the weekend, but I can’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday. Oh well, no matter, I’ll tell you what I was doing both days. On the Saturday morning I was at the hospital. I had lunch with an old friend, did some shopping in the afternoon, came back here for a bath, and then went out to the opera with a gentleman, and supper afterwards at Bertorelli’s. On the Sunday I got up late, and left about twelve to go down to the country. Some publishing people who have a place in Glou
cestershire. I’m hoping for great things from them – a little book I’ve written that I’d like to see in print.’

  She sipped her sherry and made a face. They turned out to be rather hard work, or she did, at least. He was sweet, but very nouveau, and they had the most ghastly friends in who simply talked about ski-ing all the time. They turned out to be vegetarians, so the food was grisly, too, but he had a grown-up son by his first wife, who, thank God, had a sense of humour or I might have left embarrassingly early. As it was, I drove back at a respectably late hour, and went straight to bed with a book.’

  She looked across at him with a faintly challenging smile. ‘Does that let me off the hook? Aren’t you going to take it down? I should hate to have to say it all again.’

  ‘I haven’t come to take a statement from you,’ he smiled. ‘At the moment I just want to find out some background information.’

  ‘About me?’ she asked. Was there the faintest edge to her voice?

  ‘About Richard Neal. We’ve had a difficult time getting any sort of picture of him. He seems to have been a very secretive man.’

  ‘If it’s pictures of him you want,’ she said, getting up.

  ‘I didn’t mean that literally,’ Slider said.

  ‘I know you didn’t,’ she answered, crossing the room to the bureau. ‘But if you want the story about Dick and me – which I assume is what you’ve come for — you’re going to have to let me tell it in my own way. With illustrations.’

  She brought back a cardboard box – it had ‘Basildon Bond’ on the lid in curly script, and the corners were battered with age – and sat down with it on her knee. She lifted the lid, and began to sort through the photographs inside.

  ‘This is one of the earliest pictures I’ve got of Dick and me,’ she said.

  He took it. It was an old black-and-white print, taken, he would guess from the style, in the late fifties or early sixties. A country lane – pale road, rough grass verge, tall hedge and dark trees beyond in full summer leaf; a young man and a young woman standing astride their stationary bicycles, hands on the handlebars, smiling for the camera. The front wheel of his bike had swung in to touch the front wheel of hers, like carriage horses touching noses.

  ‘He was eighteen and I was seventeen,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘Weren’t we beautiful?’

  They were both wearing shorts and shirts with the sleeves rolled up, ankle socks and lace-up shoes. Neal had thick curly hair, cut very short at the sides – was it that which made his ears seem to stand out, or did everyone have sticking-out ears in those days? With his straight nose and engaging grin, he looked like every girl’s dream boyfriend. He even had good-looking knees, Slider noted.

  Marsha Forrester – or whatever her name had been then – looked ravishingly pretty, even in black and white. Her hair was in much the same style as it was now, except she had a fringe then, and it was held back with hair-slides instead of a band. She was smiling too. They looked like clean-limbed, happy young people – advertising archetypes – and the sun was shining down on them, as it always did in that far-off, innocent land.

  Slider felt a cold shiver go down his spine. Old photographs like this made him feel melancholy. The world had moved on so far and so fast from that earless, crimeless, tellyless, always summer place he’d grown up in. The Richard Neal in this photograph had – and thank God! – no idea what a horrible, pitiful, grievous end he would come to; but the fact that he was there smiling out of the photograph made Slider feel that the young man still existed somewhere, and that the bad end was still to come, without his being able to do anything to prevent it. It was like those dreams where you tried to shout out a warning, and could only whisper.

  ‘You’d known him a long time, then,’ he said at last.

  ‘Dick used to say we went to different schools together,’ she smiled, taking the photograph back. ‘His grammar school and mine were almost next door to each other, and we lived in adjacent streets. We started going out together when I was sixteen – my mother wouldn’t have let me have a boyfriend before that. It seems impossible to imagine nowadays, doesn’t it? But Dick had been waiting outside the school gates for me and walking me home since I was fourteen.’

  While she spoke, she handed him other photographs: variations on a sunlit theme, Dick and Marsha doing innocent, healthy, Famous Five things together. Bicycles and rickety tents and country lanes featured prominently in their activities. And here they were at last actually holding hands with a mountain in the background.

  ‘When we were in the sixth form our schools did a joint school journey to Switzerland. Pretty revolutionary stuff in those days. Of course, we were put up in different hotels, the boys and the girls, but all the same …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider.

  ‘When we got back, I told my mother that Dick had kissed me. She tried so hard not to be shocked, poor dear.’ She took back the Swiss mountain. ‘We were the ideal couple in those days. Everybody thought we’d get married eventually.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know really,’ she said vaguely, hunting through the box. ‘Maybe just because everyone expected us to. You know how contrary young people can be. Then when I left school I went to University College to train as a doctor, and Dick and I didn’t see so much of each other for a while. Our experiences were very different – he had to do his National Service, of course.’

  ‘Where did he serve?’

  ‘Oh, right here in England. At Eastbourne, in fact – a cushy number, as they used to say. We used to have frightfully naughty weekends in Brighton. I was still living at home at that time, so I had to pretend I was going to visit a girlfriend. And to book into a hotel we had to pretend to be married – a Woolworth’s wedding ring, and signing in as Mr and Mrs Neal, so funny when you think back!’

  She handed him a black-and-white snap of her and Neal on the front at Brighton. He had his arm round her waist, and they both looked faintly apprehensive through their smiles. Brighton, Slider thought. Jacqui Turner, seafront photographers – how the wheel turns.

  ‘You were obviously a trail-blazer,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I think studying medicine gives you a sense of proportion. You can’t worry too much about purely local and contemporary taboos when you’re dealing with the eternal verities of life and death.’

  He handed back the picture. ‘So you went on seeing each other for the whole two years?’

  ‘Yes. It was a really happy time, when I think back on it. Perhaps the best time.’ She was silent a moment, with a smile hovering near the surface. Then it went in. ‘When he was demobbed he joined the fire brigade. His parents were terribly upset – they wanted him to pick up where he left off and go to university. They thought he was letting himself down, and I must say I was surprised myself. He had a good brain, and it seemed dreadful to me that he should waste it doing a job like that. We quarrelled about it when he told me. It was almost the end of us.’

  Echoes of Catriona Young, Slider thought — the intellectual girlfriend who thought she was too good for the likes of him. It was almost as if Neal was acting out his own life story.

  ‘Why do you think he did it?’ he asked.

  ‘He said he’d always wanted to be a fireman, ever since he was a little boy. You know, one of those eternal passions like wanting to be an engine driver. I don’t know if that was true — he’d never mentioned it to me before. But on the other hand, he seemed perfectly happy afterwards being a fireman, so maybe it was. He told his parents he didn’t want to go to university and be another three years behind everyone else, which made sense, but they never really accepted it. It caused a breach between them, which was never properly healed. They died without forgiving him – Dick minded that very much. He was a very sensitive person underneath it all.’

  Yes, he could believe that, Slider thought. Only a man obsessed with his own emotions could spread so much devastation around him. ‘And you, meanwhile, were still studying to be a doctor?’
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br />   ‘Five long years,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘It was a hard struggle, too. My father died, and all his estate was tied up in a trust, so my mother had very little to live on, and I had less. Still, one manages.’ She shrugged. ‘They say adversity builds character.’

  ‘Why did you decide to specialise in pathology? That was an unusual choice, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The perversity factor again: just because it was an unusual choice. I liked shocking people, and were they shocked at the idea of a young lady cutting up dead bodies! But there were also practical reasons – it was the least well subscribed specialisation, which meant there was no competition for places, and none later for jobs. I can’t say I’ve ever regretted it,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘When I think of my contemporaries who went on to be GPs, being coughed over by ghastly, washed-out, depressed women, and dragged out of bed at all hours …’

  ‘Surgeons have a pretty decent life, though, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, and I did use to think I’d like to be a surgeon. That would have been almost as shocking, too. But to be a surgeon you first have to go through being a houseman, and they never get to bed at all. No, I made the comfortable choice, I think.’

  ‘And did you go on seeing Dick Neal?’

  ‘Oh yes. We were always friends. And of course he introduced me to Gil — my husband — so I have him to thank for that.’

  ‘How did he take it, when you got married?’

  She hesitated. ‘He didn’t like it, of course. I think he still thought we would get married one day. For a while he was furious with both of us. But Gil asked him to be best man, and managed to talk him round. Gil was a great diplomat. And Dick really loved him. I don’t think he could have borne to lose both of us. So he had to accept it.’

  ‘Your husband knew that you and Dick had been – fond of each other?’